From Charles532@aol.com Sun Mar  8 19:35:58 1998
Date: Sat, 7 Mar 1998 08:49:22 EST
From: Charles532 
To: aegeanet@acpub.duke.edu
Cc: Charles532@aol.com
Subject: Fwd: AEGEANET Linear A not Greek

L.R. Palmer showed in the mid 1960's - by limited examples - that the language behind Linear A is indeed related to Luwian. The language can be shown to fit Alice Kober's rule regarding Indo-European languages - such name triplets as Dataro (nominative), Datare (dative) and Datara (genitive) show Indo-European inflection. The given example of una- is actually part of a word which is spelled in two different ways because the Linear A as consonant-vowel syllabary has a hard time with syllables that *end* with a consonant.

Date: Fri, 6 Mar 1998 18:29:05 +0100
From: Bjarte  Kaldhol 
To: aegeanet@acpub.duke.edu
Subject: AEGEANET Linear A not Greek

To any linguist who has worked for some time with Minoan Linear A, the idea that the language might be Greek, related to Greek (or even Attic Greek) or other IE languages like Luwian, is very unlikely, not to say impossible. Minoan is obviously an agglutinative language, as we can see by comparing the different forms of the root una-:

unaa
unakanasi
unarukanati
unaruka(na?)jasi

idaa
idami
idamate etc

Those who maintain that Minoan is IE and that endings like -mi, -si, and -ti prove this, must explain the long chains of morphemes between the root and the so-called personal endings. Root complements are as a rule very short in IE.

In Finnish, the personal endings of the present form of verbs in the first and second person plural are (almost) the same as in Modern Greek:

-mme
-tte

In my opinion, the only ancient languages that might be genetically related to Minoan, are Hurrian and Urartian.

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